What exactly was the black-winged god of desire? What secrets this masterwork uncovers about the rogue artist
The young lad cries out as his head is firmly held, a massive digit pressing into his cheek as his parent's powerful hand holds him by the neck. This moment from Abraham's Sacrifice visits the Florentine museum, creating distress through the artist's harrowing rendition of the suffering youth from the scriptural account. It seems as if Abraham, commanded by the Divine to kill his offspring, could break his neck with a solitary turn. Yet Abraham's chosen method involves the silvery grey knife he grips in his remaining palm, ready to slit Isaac's neck. A definite element stands out – whoever modeled as Isaac for this astonishing piece displayed extraordinary expressive ability. There exists not just dread, surprise and pleading in his shadowed eyes but also profound sorrow that a protector could abandon him so completely.
The artist took a familiar scriptural tale and transformed it so fresh and visceral that its horrors seemed to happen directly in front of the viewer
Standing before the painting, viewers recognize this as a real countenance, an precise depiction of a young subject, because the same boy – recognizable by his tousled hair and almost dark eyes – appears in two additional paintings by Caravaggio. In every instance, that highly emotional face dominates the composition. In John the Baptist, he gazes playfully from the darkness while embracing a lamb. In Amor Vincit Omnia, he smirks with a toughness acquired on the city's streets, his black plumed appendages demonic, a naked adolescent running chaos in a well-to-do dwelling.
Victorious Cupid, presently exhibited at a British museum, represents one of the most discomfiting artworks ever painted. Viewers feel totally disoriented looking at it. The god of love, whose arrows inspire people with frequently agonizing longing, is shown as a extremely real, brightly lit unclothed figure, straddling toppled-over objects that comprise stringed devices, a music manuscript, plate armor and an builder's T-square. This pile of possessions echoes, deliberately, the mathematical and architectural equipment strewn across the ground in Albrecht Dürer's engraving Melencolia I – except here, the melancholic mess is created by this smirking Cupid and the mayhem he can unleash.
"Affection sees not with the vision, but with the mind, / And therefore is feathered Cupid depicted sightless," wrote Shakespeare, shortly before this work was produced around 1601. But Caravaggio's Cupid is not unseeing. He gazes directly at the observer. That face – sardonic and rosy-cheeked, staring with bold confidence as he poses unclothed – is the identical one that shrieks in terror in The Sacrifice of Isaac.
As the Italian master created his three portrayals of the identical unusual-looking youth in Rome at the dawn of the 17th century, he was the most acclaimed sacred painter in a metropolis enflamed by Catholic revival. Abraham's Offering reveals why he was commissioned to decorate churches: he could take a biblical story that had been portrayed many times previously and render it so fresh, so unfiltered and physical that the terror seemed to be occurring directly in front of you.
However there existed another aspect to the artist, apparent as quickly as he came in Rome in the winter that ended 1592, as a painter in his initial 20s with no mentor or supporter in the urban center, just talent and audacity. Most of the paintings with which he captured the sacred city's eye were anything but holy. What may be the absolute earliest hangs in the UK's art museum. A youth parts his crimson mouth in a yell of pain: while reaching out his filthy digits for a fruit, he has instead been bitten. Boy Bitten By a Lizard is sensuality amid poverty: observers can see the painter's dismal chamber reflected in the murky liquid of the transparent container.
The boy sports a rose-colored flower in his coiffure – a emblem of the sex trade in early modern art. Northern Italian painters such as Titian and Palma Vecchio depicted prostitutes holding flowers and, in a work lost in the WWII but known through images, Caravaggio portrayed a famous female courtesan, clutching a posy to her bosom. The message of all these floral signifiers is obvious: sex for purchase.
What are we to make of the artist's erotic portrayals of boys – and of a particular adolescent in specific? It is a question that has divided his commentators ever since he gained widespread recognition in the 1980s. The complex past truth is that the artist was neither the homosexual icon that, for example, the filmmaker put on film in his twentieth-century film Caravaggio, nor so entirely pious that, as certain art scholars improbably claim, his Boy With a Basket of Fruit is in fact a likeness of Jesus.
His initial paintings indeed make overt sexual implications, or including propositions. It's as if Caravaggio, then a penniless youthful creator, aligned with the city's prostitutes, offering himself to live. In the Florentine gallery, with this thought in consideration, observers might turn to an additional initial work, the 1596 masterpiece Bacchus, in which the deity of alcohol stares calmly at the spectator as he begins to undo the black sash of his garment.
A several annums following Bacchus, what could have driven the artist to create Amor Vincit Omnia for the art collector Vincenzo Giustiniani, when he was at last growing almost respectable with important church commissions? This unholy pagan deity resurrects the sexual provocations of his early works but in a increasingly powerful, unsettling manner. Half a century later, its secret seemed clear: it was a representation of Caravaggio's companion. A English traveller viewed the painting in about 1649 and was told its subject has "the body & face of [Caravaggio's|his] owne youth or servant that slept with him". The name of this adolescent was Francesco.
The painter had been dead for about forty years when this account was documented.
